“Interesting,” I managed to mutter, avoiding Hart’s eyes by focusing on a portrait of “Chesty” Puller on the wall behind him. The crusty general’s hawklike eyes glared back as if warning me to beware of Brits wearing silk weskits.
I was still pondering how I might say, “Yes, and could that cashier’s check be deposited in my bank account by tomorrow?” when he said something that brought me back to earth, and not a little angrily.
“Or if you prefer, I will sell you mine for the same amount.”
First Sexton, then this guy. Why does everyone think I’m rich?
“I can’t come up with that kind of money.”
Hart raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“I see.” He returned the magazine and the copy of Anderson’s affidavit to his satchel. “Sorry, chum, but leverage does have its advantages.”
I looked at my watch again.
“What if the third journal were to be found?”
“That is a rather large ‘if,’ ” he said, after drawing a deep breath. “I have no more inkling where it may be than you. My inquiries in Hawaii proved fruitless.”
“Undoubtedly, being firsthand observations, Gibson’s journals represent something interesting. But just how important were they, coming from a grunt Marine?”
“He was far more than that,” Hart declared. “By the third voyage, Gibson knew enough of the native lingo to be Cook’s translator as well as personal bodyguard. I doubt that any of the people, with the possible exception of Lieutenant Gore, knew the captain better. As a result, Gibson would have been a witness to the deterioration of Cook’s mental as well as physical health.”
“How bad had it become?”
“During his last eighteen days on earth this meticulous observer produced neither log nor diary entry. I suspect it was because Cook never intended to return from the Pacific.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I most certainly am. The beginning of the rot can be seen in Gibson’s second journal. I am certain that, if found, the third will provide the truth.”
“The greatest British seaman in history shown to be a deserter? That won’t sit well with the Royal Navy.”
“All the better, then. The truth will out. It would be one of the greatest scoops in British history and may well answer why in Cook’s last moments he waved off any attempt to save him. The Marines and sailors in the boats just off the rock closest to him surely wouldn’t have abandoned him in his greatest hour of need. Did Cook intend to protect his Hawaiian attackers? And why didn’t the officers of the ship seek to recover his body immediately after the natives retreated? Consider the value of having that information in your hands.”
I sat back, struggling to imagine the firestorm in Britain if Hart’s conjectures were proven.
“Do you really think a third journal exists?”
Hart smiled, but his lips were pressed tightly together and his eyes had turned hard. The palms of his hands slowly skidded back and forth on the smooth leather arms of the chair.
“No more than I knew you had the first. Come, Bevan,” he coaxed genially, “if you wish to bet a hundred thousand dollars on your finding the third someday, I will sell mine to you. Otherwise, I’m prepared to buy yours this very afternoon.”
“I suggest we each keep ours for a while,” I said, after a long hesitation. “If the third journal appears on the market, then we can discuss partnering to obtain it. How we share the proceeds can wait until we have something tangible.”
Hart’s smile dissolved.
“Should that be the case, I might agree to share some of the pot, but certainly not fifty-fifty. If I find it, I will offer you fifteen percent of the combined value of the three. I have the resources and the contacts. You don’t. Really, Bevan, take the hundred thousand dollars today. Bird in the hand and all that. Talk to Clive Sexton about this. He’s a reputable enough chap—for an Australian.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, standing up. “But I’d like to sleep on it.”
“Very well, do that; but I suggest not too lightly.”
Chapter Seven
I returned to my room on the sixth floor of the Club, where I placed the journal in a drawer, tucked between a sweater and a stack of underwear. After a quick shower and change of clothes, I rode the trolley over Russian Hill to The Buena Vista, a café bar at Hyde and Beach famous for its Irish coffee.
It was late afternoon and still raining, but the place was packed with tourists and a smattering of young professionals from the financial district. I found a table in the corner next to the plate-glass window looking out to Alcatraz and the Golden Gate. While sipping an Irish coffee, I recalled Herndon Taylor mentioning an eerie coincidence associated with Cook’s ships and Newport, the town where Carol and I discovered Gibson’s journal.
After the completion of its historic voyage, the British put the Endeavor to use during the Revolutionary War as a prison ship. In 1778 they scuttled it in Newport Harbor in an attempt to blockade the port from attacking American and French forces. Fifteen years later, the Resolution, by then converted to a French whaler, had a similarly ignoble fate when it ran aground in the same Rhode Island harbor and was abandoned.
At the time, the two ships coming to rest in the same waters meant nothing more to me than a quaint snippet of local history. But so many years later as I sat in the café, watching the fog creep across San Francisco Bay, his story took on a personal significance.
Was it more than chance that Gibson’s journal had found its way to me so near the graves of both ships? Had fate linked me to the ghost of James Cook?
* * *
I ended the evening at a bar on Ninth and Dash, where, at some point after my fourth or fifth whiskey, I decided to accept Hart’s offer.
Staggering back to the Marines’ Memorial Club, I used the room key card to open my door and awoke six hours later with a hangover that would have made John Barrymore jealous.
Shortly after seven A.M. I stood over the bathroom sink, chomping on a couple of cherry-flavored Tums when my cell phone played its piano-riff ringtone.
“Bevan here.”
“Tell me you have it.”
It was Adrian Hart’s voice, but it was not at all plummy.
“Have what?”
“My journal, damn you! Gibson’s second voyage.”
“I thought you’d left it in London.”
“Well, I didn’t. There were people whom I intended to show it to at the fair before I heard about you.”
“Sorry, Adrian, but I—”
Suddenly, I felt sicker than even my hangover warranted.
“Wait a minute,” I said, dashing to the armoire and opening the drawer.
At least the thief hadn’t taken my Fruit of the Loom undies.
* * *
An hour later, Hart and I and an equally distraught Clive Sexton sat next to one another in a windowless room of SFPD’s Property Crimes Division, learning how the thief hacked open my door by plugging a programmed gadget into the power port near the key card lock.
“Every tech-literate schoolkid between here and San Jose knows the trick.” Lieutenant Fishbank sounded somewhat surprised that we didn’t. “Now, Mr. Sexton, when did you first notice that William Bartow was missing? And please, speak directly into the microphone.”
* * *
I’d never bothered to insure my book holdings. Nonetheless, I filed a claim on my general homeowner’s coverage and received a very polite, very prompt, and very expected rejection. It didn’t help to know that Hart’s exclusive antiquarian insurer had offered him a mere ten thousand pounds for his loss, “pending certification of its authenticity.”
Despite Clive Sexton’s pleas, accompanied by his empty threats to quit the company, Holt House Rare Books refused to consider any reimbursement to our shops. According to their lawyers, even if the thefts could be pinned on Bartow, he was an independent contractor whose fraudulent actions could not have been foreseen.
Granted, I’d been foolish to not place the journal in the valuables locker of the Marines’ Memorial Club. It shouldn’t have surprised me that even a modern key lock system was vulnerable, but I was at a loss to figure out how Bartow knew my room number until I recalled Sexton’s comment that the lad had a nose for finding books. He’d probably added quite a few to his portfolio in the past by just such larceny, sneaking from book fairs in mid-afternoon and heading for hotel rooms where dealers often leave purchases from the previous day.
The biggest mystery, however, was how Bartow thought he could profit from the theft of Gibson’s journals. What dealer or collector would risk paying for such easily identified stolen goods once word got out?
“They’ll show up,” Lieutenant Fishbank had said. “Just a matter of time.”
Neither Hart nor I found any comfort in his words.
Chapter Eight
I returned home the next day to a city still locked in winter’s deep freeze. The months stretched into spring, but the search for Bartow and our journals went nowhere.
My daily email exchanges with Adrian Hart trickled to two a week, then nothing. Eventually, the loss settled into a corner of my mind like a faintly disagreeable odor.
Thanks mostly to Josie’s coup in selling the signed edition of The Plays of Eugene O’Neill and her heroic effort to convince an interior decorator to buy two hundred hardbacks I’d destined for the trash bin, Riverrun Books enjoyed a break-even quarter. Josie even got Eddie Worth IV to drop four hundred dollars for an 1858 bio of the Earl of Kildare. Every morning found me waking up downright cheery.
You’d think I would have learned that such bliss only meant things were about to get worse. Ask any nun.
Despite the decent numbers for the first quarter, I knew the days for bookshops like mine were ending and the Gibson journal had been my last chance to make it as an antiquarian dealer. Nearly half of my sales for the past year were due to listings on the dot-coms AbeBooks and Alibris. A year before, they’d made up only fifteen percent. People were coming in less and less. The gap between store and Internet sales was sure to increase. Most of Riverrun’s income went for rent and utilities. Having an open shop, for all its intellectual and psychological benefits, was bleeding my meager savings.
A dismal second quarter made it even more clear how dire things were. By June every other used-book store owner in the area had closed. One who had specialized in mysteries and thrillers continued to sell her inventory from a home computer. I could have done that, too, but sitting in front of a blue screen typing in title, author, price, and condition of old classics wasn’t what I had in mind when I sought to reinvent myself.
At the age of forty-five, I had $23,000 in the bank. My house was debt-free, but I couldn’t afford to have the leaky roof fixed or pay a kid to cut the grass. I needed to start making real money again and the logical option was to return to what I had come to intensely dislike.
After a long talk with Josie, I called Tim Winter. My former law partner had loaned me the money to start Riverrun. Now I was contacting him to help me close it. Tim and I had always had a complex relationship. A lot of it had to do with my relationship with his wife before he knew her.
Alice O’Hare and I had been childhood friends and on-again-off-again lovers during our college years. If I hadn’t met Carol, we might have tied the knot. Tim caught Alice on the rebound and he wasn’t the type to forget it. When I was accused of murdering a fellow bookman, he took my case. But I got out of that jam with precious little help from him and I never got over the feeling that he secretly relished my fall from grace. He wouldn’t have cried had I been convicted.
Now Tim seemed happy to help restart my career as long as I—and Alice—understood it was due to his beneficence and subject to his continued control.
“Still think the board will reinstate my license?”
“Sure, Mike. They were ready to do it two years ago if you’d bothered to apply. I’ve got an office waiting for you here.”
Before I could thank him, he added, “You’ll be ‘of counsel,’ however.”
“Of counsel?” I asked, stifling the urge to remind him that I’d been the founder of the firm he now headed.
“Afraid so. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair to our senior associates. Build your client base, do the work I know you’re capable of, and a partner’s chair will open up eventually.”
I envisioned a desk in a windowless room midway between twenty-something associates and a mile from the corner offices of partners who were my age or younger. I’d be handling no-fault divorces and fixing traffic tickets into my fifties.
“I understand,” I lied. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said, in a voice dripping with condescension. “Honestly, Mike, it’s good to hear you’ve come to your senses. I figured economic reality would trump this conceit of becoming a real antiquarian dealer, but it’s taken longer than I expected.”
I greeted his comments with ten seconds of seething silence. Winter, besides being a top lawyer, was one of the Midwest’s finest book collectors. Early on, Tim’s expertise had been as valuable to my fledgling book career as his initial financial backing. Now he was telling me he never believed I would succeed with Riverrun. I considered telling him to take a flying leap over a herd of flatulent sheep.
Instead, I managed to remind him that I had repaid his loan, with interest, two years earlier.
“Of course you did. Don’t get me wrong, Mike, this little bookshop was right for you when your options were, shall we say, limited. But now you’ve a chance to restart a once-flourishing career.”
A career built defending strippers, drug dealers, and loan sharks, I said to myself. Some flourish. Some career.
We talked a bit more about how the liquidation of assets would proceed, whether the landlord would let me out of the lease six months early, and other depressing end-of-business affairs that seemed to have a striking similarity to funeral arrangements.
Chapter Nine
One week later, Josie opened the bookstore while I spent an extra hour at home studying for the upcoming bar exam. Despite a diligent effort fueled by half a pot of coffee, I found the Rule Against Perpetuities made as little sense to me as it had in law school. To clear my head, I worked out with weights in my basement, then headed to the shop.
I had just settled behind the counter to begin listing new acquisitions when Josie emerged from Café Provence holding a steaming cup of cappuccino.
“A lady’s been asking for you,” she said, pointing a thumb toward the café. “In there.”
“Do you know her?”
“No, but apparently you do,” she said dryly.
“What does that mean?”
“If you don’t know by now, babe, I’ve got some land in Florida…”
She headed to the philosophy section, shaking her fanny like a table dancer in the Sirloin District.
I walked through the entrance of the bistro, stopped to scan the bustling room, then took twenty seconds to readjust my eyeballs.
Pillow Wilkes sat boldly erect at a table in a far corner, her back against a tall window through which sunlight streamed. A half-eaten croissant lay on a china plate beside a teacup. She wore a soft gray business suit and, despite the heat outside, a black cashmere turtleneck.
Her dusky rose complexion was as I remembered from San Francisco. So were the full red lips and strong chin. Even in the morning brightness her hair was the color of midnight, absorbing color rather than reflecting it. Three long fingers rested casually above the right side of her jaw so as to cover the top portion of the scar not hidden by the sweater. The incongruous mixture of hardboiled determination with that hint of physical insecurity was striking. She seemed to have no understanding of the effect that her beauty, marred as it was, had on people.
When I approached she gave me the slightest nod as if we’d seen each other earlier that morning instead of a year and fifteen hundred miles ago.
If that was to be he
r game, I decided to play it as well. I pulled up a chair across from her, plopped my elbows on the table, and casually cupped my chin in the palms of my hands.
“Small world,” I said.
“Adrian has gone to New Zealand. I need your help finding him.”
I barked a laugh.
Her deep-set eyes stared evenly into mine.
“Billy Bartow is there as well.”
“How do you know?”
“A colleague at the University of Otago spotted him at a book fair in Christchurch. Adrian erased the email message, but not before I got a glimpse of it. He swore me to secrecy, insisting I not go to the police or alert the insurance people.”
“Why doesn’t he want them to handle it?”
“Adrian suspects Bartow is close to finding the third journal. If the police get involved, it might drive the little shit further underground. The chance of getting the stolen journals back—let alone finding the third—would be lost forever.”
“Hart didn’t intend to let either of us know. Why should we help him?”
“To protect our own interests, for one thing. He’s not thinking straight. Adrian might have been able to handle the loss of our journal, but he feels terribly responsible for yours.”
“That doesn’t sound like the self-centered braggart I met, Pillow.”
“You don’t know him like I do.”
“All right, so maybe he’s a decent human being who’s suffering a first-class case of remorse, but that’s not enough to make me think he isn’t in full gallop on a wild-goose chase.”
“We owe it to him to help.”
“The guy’s a former commando. They tend to be self-sufficient.”
She took a deep breath. To my amazement, a tear formed at the corner of an eye.
“Adrian’s been drinking too much,” she said, dabbing at the waterworks with her napkin. “Something he never did before. Two months ago he made a horrible mistake in an appraisal of Lord Wycliffe’s incunabula. It caused the Smoot Museum all sorts of problems with the Inland Revenue. If he doesn’t find Bartow and recover those journals I think he’ll harm himself.”
Left Turn at Paradise Page 5
